Jo-Ann Passmore daughter, Casandra, was just like any other kid.

“Loved school, loved people, absolutely love her dog Heidi, had a ton of friends all the time.”

Casandra’s childhood was cut short after she started using drugs when was just fourteen.

“In life there are social classes and my social class was very low. I wanted to be with preps and I wanted to be with the cool kids and that wasn’t working so I found a group of friends that did appreciate me and accept me for who I was. They used drugs and I thought for me to fit in, I got to start doing drugs to be one of them,” says Casandra.

“The first thing she started out with was marijuana and her boyfriend introduced her to that. I could smell something but I never put two and two together or I just had blinders on as a mom I guess because I never noticed it,” said Jo-Ann.

“I would leave school and go to friend’s house whose parents were comfortable with that lifestyle for their children and allowed them to do drugs in the house. I found I could just spend my days there,” added Casandra.

In her first year of high school in Collingwood, Casandra missed 384 out of 400 classes. And her drug problem was getting worse. Her parents couldn’t figure out how to help.

“During that time I thought that was the only way of life and I had to find more by whatever means and I did some pretty crazy things to get drugs.”

“When I went into her room to get her up for school and she opened her eyes and she looked at me and said ‘I’m giving you five seconds to be out of the room or you’re going to be dead.’ And she would come off like a cat and sent me across the room into the closet literally,” says Jo-Ann.

“I just became necessary every day to feed this habit and this way of life because nothing else would make me feel better at that time,” said Casandra.

When she was 15, Casandra left home with no real place to go.

“I didn’t know if she was sleeping, if she was eating, if she was being raped, if she was being killed,” added her mother. “I would go driving just to see if I could see her. I never really did and if I did she would run. So I could never get stopped fast enough to grab her to say come home, she wouldn’t. And when I did see her, even being pregnant, she was just so strung out, it was scary.”

“I wouldn’t let anybody get to me, it was just too sad and too mad and blaming everybody instead of really looking at what I could do to go forward,” said Casandra.

During that time Casandra had two children, two boys.

“There was one instance my oldest son and I got kicked out of where we were living because I wouldn’t give the person money for drugs and my son and I were on the street at four in the morning pacing up and down the sidewalks not knowing where to go.”

Eventually she gave up both children for adoption.

“I remember - I knew I was going to sign custody over and I went on a three day crack binge. I had spent my rent money, I got my parents to give me some money that I also spent on crack and I went to CAS and I signed over custody and I gave up. That was the hardest part of my life, to know that I had no children, no responsibility…my life was gone. I didn’t think that I would ever have a life back.”

“I was waiting for a call, literally to say that she was dead,” said Jo-Ann.

Luckily that call never came.

In Part 5 of The High Life, Katherine Ward will tell what happened to change the course of Casandra’s life.